People who bought this also bought...

The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

The Sound and the Fury

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling", the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers: the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin, and the monstrous Jason.

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy's classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature. Generations of readers have been enthralled by his magnificent heroine, the unhappily married Anna Karenina, and her tragic affair with dashing Count Vronsky.

Ulysses

Ulysses is regarded by many as the single most important novel of the 20th century. It tells the story of one day in Dublin, June 16th 1904, largely through the eyes of Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman. Both begin a normal day, and both set off on a journey around the streets of Dublin, which eventually brings them into contact with one another.

A Clockwork Orange

A vicious 15-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic, a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. In Anthony Burgess' nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology.

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel of the Roaring Twenties is beloved by generations of readers and stands as his crowning work. This new audio edition, authorized by the Fitzgerald estate, is narrated by Oscar-nominated actor Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain). Gyllenhaal's performance is a faithful delivery in the voice of Nick Carraway, the Midwesterner turned New York bond salesman, who rents a small house next door to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby....

Slaughterhouse-Five

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

Brave New World

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

1984: New Classic Edition

George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominated by Big Brother and its vast network of agents, including the Thought Police - a world in which news is manufactured according to the authorities' will and people live tepid lives by rote. Winston Smith, a hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system in which privacy does not exist and where those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death, he knows there is no hope for him.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac's classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "beat" and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that "set them free".

Tropic of Cancer

Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for 27 years after its first publication in Paris in 1943. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller's famed mixture of memoir and fiction.

Crime and Punishment

In this intense detective thriller instilled with philosophical, religious, and social commentary, Dostoevsky studies the psychological impact upon a desperate and impoverished student when he murders a despicable pawnbroker, transgressing moral law to ultimately "benefit humanity".

Don Quixote: Translated by Edith Grossman

Sixteenth-century Spanish gentleman Don Quixote, fed by his own delusional fantasies, takes to the road in search of chivalrous adventures. But his quest leads to more trouble than triumph. At once humorous, romantic, and sad, Don Quixote is a literary landmark. This fresh edition, by award-winning translator Edith Grossman, brings the tale to life as never before.

Tampa

Celeste Price is an eighth-grade English teacher in suburban Tampa. But Celeste's devotion lies elsewhere. She has a singular sexual obsession: 14-year-old boys. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress driven by pure motivation. She deceives everyone, and cares nothing for anyone or anything but her own pleasure. With crackling, rampantly unadulterated prose, Tampa is a grand, uncompromising, seriocomic examination of want and a scorching literary debut.

Catch-22

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he's assigned, he'll be in violation of Catch-22.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

This novel is indeed a morality tale about the hazards of egotistical self-indulgence. Dorian Grey's pact with evil allows his portrait to take on his many sins and degradations while his physical appearance remains youthful. Over the years as he becomes cruel and vicious, even murderous, Dorian's young and perfect body is no longer enough to salvage his deteriorating mind and morality. Will justice and good prevail?

War and Peace

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy's genius is clearly seen in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle, all of them fully realized and equally memorable.

In Search of Lost Time (Dramatized)

Featuring a fictional version of himself - 'Marcel' - and a host of friends, acquaintances, and lovers, In Search of Lost Time is Proust's search for the key to the mysteries of memory, time, and consciousness. As he recalls his childhood days, the sad affair of Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy, his transition to manhood, the tortures of love and the ravages of war, he realises that the simplest of discoveries can lead to astonishing possibilities.

The Stranger

Albert Camus' The Stranger is one of the most widely read novels in the world, with millions of copies sold. It stands as perhaps the greatest existentialist tale ever conceived, and is certainly one of the most important and influential books ever produced. Now, for the first time, this revered masterpiece is available as an unabridged audio production.

Doctor Zhivago

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.

Publisher's Summary

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Savagely funny and hauntingly sad, Lolita is Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel. It is the story of tortured college professor Humbert Humbert and his dangerous obsession with honey-skinned schoolgirl Dolores Haze.

Determined to possess his "Lolita", Humbert embarks on a disastrous journey across an American landscape littered with fast-food diners, gas stations and lonely motels. Brilliantly evocative and bitingly satirical in its depiction of postwar America, Lolita still has the power to shock and beguile.

Dear reader, listening to this audiobook version of Lolita was a fascinating experience: beautiful and poisonous, loving and loathing, sad and funny, sublime and debased, pure and rotten, refined and vulgar, European and American. The premise, a middle-aged man who is a connoisseur of "nymphets" (pre-pubescent girls with a seemingly "demoniac" and "soul-shattering charm") becomes the step-father of one, may shock or repulse. But Nabokov is unsettlingly effective at making us sympathize with his first-person narrator, Humbert Humbert. The novel is also interesting for being comprised of skewed pieces of various genres: buddy-road-adventure, romance, erotic, metafiction, tragedy, and European critique of America.

There is some French in the novel, but usually the context implies what Humbert is saying.

Jeremy Irons expresses his thorough understanding of Nabokov's novel throughout his reading of it. From the opening foreword by the outrageously pedantic American Dr. John Ray, Jr., followed immediately by the creepy sensual beauty of the opening lines of Humbert's story ("Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta" etc.), Irons' voice helps to seduce the reader more and more into Humbert's head and heart and world than the text does alone. He really becomes Humbert in his various moods, including poetic ecstasy, peevish anger, guilty despair, surreal delirium, and philosophic acceptance. It was a pleasure to hear him speaking in Lolita's vulgar American pre-teen voice one moment and in Humbert's world-weary European aesthete's the next. He also does a fine job with the other supporting characters, like Clare Quilty the amoral and successful playwright who speaks a debauched and effeminate American English that simulates by turns movie gangsters, British upper crusts, or French intellectuals.

Jeremy Irons gives a perfect performance as Humbert Humbert (the narrator & fictional author of the story). His tone creates exactly the right amount of compulsion to listen while remaining a repellent character. If you know you want to read Lolita then this is the version you want.

As for the story, the way Nabokov brings the reader in as co-conspirator is both attractive & repellent. If we do not read Humbert's book, his crimes are not witnessed - possibly never committed. As reader we are complicit in every aspect of his crimes.

It's an incredible tale & we are invited right into Humbert's mind, where we are manipulated much the same way he manipulates everyone else around him.

The prose is remarkable. It is possible that Humbert is the most detested fictional character in the world while his story of "Lolita" is one of the finest stories ever written.

I don't know why I have never read Nabokov but somehow I only came to read him now. The combination of Nabokov and Jeremy Iron's is a very powerful and toxic, in the most pleasurable kind of toxicity, concoction. I was spellbound and horrified by the compelling sentiment that I found myself entertaining towards the paedophile main character. It is a shocking story at one level of a man's attraction and obsession with young girl-children, but it is also hilarious and Nabokov's rich and vivid, floral use of the English language is breathtaking and captivating. I will read this book again and again. Jeremy Iron's performance is masterful/ how his tongue trips so eloquently across the words is miraculous. I will remember this listening experience for a long time to come!

I struggled at the beginning of the book, with the never ending narrative, with no 'speech', but stuck with it an was very pleased I did. Jeremy Irons' narration was great... How could one fail to like his voice? I am also pleased to have discovered Nabokov, as his blend of wit and darkness was wonderful. Excellent.

A wonderful book of great literary significance read by a remarkable narrator/actor. I was never once doubting of the central character who's complex personality was admirably portrayed by Irons.

Who was your favorite character and why?

The central character.

What does Jeremy Irons bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

A remarkable rendition of this classic work. A huge talented narration perhaps equal to this great piece of writing. Like Shakespeare performed by the National Theatre. It amply raises this book by making it accessible to many who may have struggled because of its complexity, in addition to the authors intended confusion of reality and paranoia of the mentally insane...or was he?.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Lolita is a classic, a narrative that crosses the social line but never alienates its reader because of it.

This book is fantastic. It is written as the confessions of one Humbert Humbert (not his real name) with regards to his relationship with his young step-daughter after the mothers untimely death. This disturbing subject matter is beautifully crafted into a story that is heart-breaking for it's insight into the delusional self-justification of Humbert and the consequence of his actions, whilst at the same time having moments of genuine humour. This dark humour is kept suitably distant from the obscenity of his conduct such that one does not feel guilty for finding mirth amongst such a troubling subject. There is nothing gratuitous in this book and it is a testament to the authors great skill that he can capture so many varied emotions between its covers.

Jeremy Irons' gravelly, plumby, british accent does a fantastic job of Humbert Humberts narrative and in my mind, has set up a dubious association with the great actor for many years to come!

16 of 16 people found this review helpful

Tom

West Wickham, United Kingdom

5/4/10

Overall

"a truly spellbinding and brilliant book"

Nabokov is a truly great writer (a Nobel prize winner I think); only a great writer could take such a potentially tawdry subject - a middle aged man's obsession with and sexual exploitation of a 12-year old girl - and turn it into a compelling story of the complexity of human relationships without glossing over the darkness, the emptiness and the pain. And the combination of Nabokov's brilliantly fluent and poetical prose and Jeremy Irons' superb narration is such an intoxicating mix - an outstanding audiobook by any yardstick. Superb stuff indeed. I've listened to around 500 audiobooks over the last 15 years and this must be one of the best. Strongly recommended. A genuine 5-star listen.

21 of 22 people found this review helpful

Joff

Lyme Regis, England

9/17/09

Overall

"Brilliant"

Great book and beautifully narrated by Jeremy Irons. The most pleasant surprise yet on Audible. Fantastic!!

10 of 10 people found this review helpful

Eye_Doc

Coventry, UK

4/7/13

Overall

"Disturbing, dark and (occasionally) funny(!)"

This is the best audiobook I have heard. The delivery is stunning, always on cue and appropriate and really sinks you into the story and the very disturbing mind of HH. Audiobooks of this quality are far better than reading and are more a one person performance than a book reading.

8 of 8 people found this review helpful

Kirstine

Bonnyrigg, United Kingdom

3/4/12

Overall

"Disquieting but riveting story"

Jeremy Irons does a marvellous narration of this very unsettling story. It's more explicit than the filmed versions and gets to the heart of the desires of men who crave sexual satisfaction with girls in their early teens. Nabokov's fine writing raises the story from being mere pornography and has created a book with a fine mix of humorous human foibles and vanities coupled with an exploration of perversion and the damage it can cause.

7 of 7 people found this review helpful

Isata

BirminghamUnited Kingdom

5/13/10

Overall

"Captivating - audio at its best!"

This book makes the best of audio: I found myself completely wrapped up in it. Read perfectly by Jeremy Irons, the novel is thrilling, beautiful and shocking all at the same time. It is wonderfully written and Irons voices the language with accomplished skill. Given the subject matter (an exploitative and abusive relationship between a middle-aged man and an attention-seeking young girl), I was surprised at how funny and touching the novel was, and how much I didn't want it to end. Nabokov manages to captivate without titillating, and brings you into his character's mind without ever condoning what he does. This is one that I'll be listening to - and reading - again and again.

6 of 6 people found this review helpful

P1969

3/29/13

Overall

"Utterly gripping"

This novel stands or falls with the voice you imagine (or hear) as the central character Humbert Humbert. To hear Jeremy Irons bring H.H. to life, in all his preposterous longing, his self-deception, his erudition and cunning, his Old World debauchery and his scepticism towards the popular culture of postwar America, is utterly delightful. I found myself grinning, raising my eyebrows and laughing out loud. Irons' interpretation contributes a great deal to making this a provocative, hilarious and utterly perturbing experience. We are appalled by this character and yet we want to follow him every step of the way; we shouldn't want to read about a middle-aged man longing for a twelve-year-old, and yet we're fascinated by every sentence, complicit in every move. An absolute masterpiece, and a masterly reading. Loved it, loved it, loved it.

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

Stephen

Hitchin, United Kingdom

6/14/12

Overall

"Have Moral Patience"

Thank you Jeremy Irons, Humbert Humbert's voice will always be yours. As the Father of three girls aged between 8 and 15 my listening was very uncomfortable to the half way mark. The writings beauty kept me listening.Slowly the message of the book grew its root structure into my understanding, untill it was fused into my mind. The Nabokov mind had investigated every aspect and drew its consequences so clearly that the colour of the crime was as bright as the blood on Quiltys lips. Its consequences on all the characters was as glass. A wonderful, chilling and throughly suitable book for the modern age.

10 of 11 people found this review helpful

Ken Inglis

5/25/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Mesmerizing narration!"

Over half a century on from its initial publication, this book still remains disturbing and shocking!

Universally accepted as a modern classic, it is described as a tragic comedy. However, don't expect any laughs. The author creates a truly detestable anti hero who's relationship with the eponymous Lolita should leave no place for any emotion except revulsion. That you do feel empathy for him, towards the end of the book, is something that you may not thank the author for.

The book is written in a self-consciously literary style. There is subtle word play and considerable use of French phrases and language which are impossible to fully appreciate in a rapid audio format. The plot is easily followed but feels contrived; with a final conclusion that I found unrealistic and a slight afterthought.

Narration in this work is simply mesmerizing. Jeremy Irons gives a performance which is both urbane, educated and monstrous all at the same time. Igore his portrayal of peripheral characters, it is in his depiction of the central protagonist that his liquid voice resonates love, desolation and madness.

This is not an easy audiobook to listen to. The subject matter is revolting. Linguistically, the book is knowingly high brow. There are sections of it written in French, which receive no translation!

This is a clsssic though. It comes alive through Iron's haunting voice and will stay with the listener many weeks after.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Tajinder

tendring, essex, United Kingdom

5/13/09

Overall

"OH MY OH MY"

I happened to listen to this book by chance when I was driving to and from work and I was spellbound. Jeremy Irons narrates it beautifully and my heart ached all the way through.

8 of 10 people found this review helpful

Report Inappropriate Content

If you find this review inappropriate and think it should be removed from our site, let us know. This report will be reviewed by Audible and we will take appropriate action.